If anyone had answered her, she might have leaped back through the manhole fast enough to break her neck. But the storage space was silent. The back of her head tore through a thick cobweb. She frantically pulled white silk strips from her hair, then told herself to calm down. The torch beam trembled. She trained it on the footprints and followed them. One after another, they led her deeper into the dark.

It was cramped and hot. Her heart sped up. Sweat pooled on the collar of her T-shirt. The ceiling was too low. The space was somehow both claustrophobic and a vast, endless void at the same time. She clipped her foot against something hard and winced in pain. She shone the torch at her feet and saw a paint-stained old dumbbell. John had brought a set to the island once, years ago, with the intention of working out every morning, but she couldn’t remember ever seeing him use them.

She scanned the space left to right and spotted the light switch. She hit the switch with the heel of her hand, but nothing happened.

She was about to walk away from the light switch when she noticed the electrical outlet below it, switched off. A power board was plugged in, and stuffed with double adaptors and extension cords that slithered out into the dark like snakes. She switched it on.

First there came a deep humming noise, rumbling out at her from different layers of space. Then, one after another, there were sparks of light. Stunning blues, bright greens and harsh whites. Bug zappers. Kate counted eleven – Russ Graves’s entire stock. They were clustered at various points around the room, forming a loose perimeter from corner to corner of the attic.

With real terror, she pictured John’s Visitor, its black eyes and featureless face, its thin mouth opening and moths fluttering out, filling the room. With the cavity now brightly lit, she had no need for the torch. She could clearly see the trail of footprints weaving around several stacks of clutter – a crate of pots and pans, a dusty stack of paperbacks, and a cardboard box marked, Mia’s Little Girl Toys – and then gathered at a small object. A black metal lock-box.

Two perfect round circles in the dust told Kate someone had kneeled before the box. She reached for it but recoiled when one of the bug zappers cracked loudly behind her. She turned, half expecting to see Mia’s child-eating gremlin scrambling towards her. An unlucky insect had met its end in the bug zapper, that was all.